At the end of the tour, Cole slides up next to me. “There’s a rumor about that, huh?” he asks.
“What?” I say. “There is. I just started it.”
“You really made all that up, didn’t you?” he asks.
“Yes, I did,” I whisper, nudging his healing arm with my shoulder. “And if you ever wanna get lucky again, you won’t breathe a word of it.”
“Word of what?” he asks.
“Exactly.”
“‘Maple Street, USA,” Chicky calls across the diner, not caring who hears. “‘At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 p.m.’”
Something in me twists back to life at these words, a quote from our favorite episode of The Twilight Zone, one Bruja Lupe used to let us watch over and over if it wasn’t too close to bedtime.
“‘Meteors can do crazy things, you know,’” I quote back.
She grins, because even though these are borrowed words from an old TV show, we both know them to be true.
By now, the radio waves of that first broadcast of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” have probably gone as far as Wolf 1055, and Pegasus, and Vega, and so many other stars we have named because we are not close enough to ask them their names. Every movie and song stretches out into the universe like that. Everything travels out and eventually reaches the stars.
So maybe the part about the astronomical discoveries is something I made up. But our universe is full of so many more unlikely things. Many of them found us here, just in the last few weeks.
A diner about to close became a place that holds a hundred voices all at once.
A town believed all the possibilities held in swirls of crater rocks.
Four friends made those swirls of crater rocks, sharing the same desert night.
A girl spoke the truth of herself so loud a whole town heard her.
Another girl came back from stardust.
So maybe it’s not exactly true, about astronomers getting their big ideas at a diner in a tiny desert town.
But it could have happened.
A lot of things happen here.